If Ready or Not never quite feels like a cult classic in the making — the scares are soft, the imagery is familiar, and the ending is so batshit that it confirms your nagging sense that the previous 90 minutes were holding back — it’s still wickedly entertaining from start to finish, and painted with enough fresh personality to resolve into something more than the sum of its parts.

For all of its heady ideas, some of which it explores to greater effect than others, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles is most striking for how it illustrates that animation isn’t a mere subcategory of cinema. That movies have always been a unique medium for how they see reality and unreality as two overlapping roads towards the same truth.

The film has style in spades; it would have substance, too, if only it knew when to quit.

Moner’s charisma keeps things pushing forward, and so does the film’s appealing spirit. If only every big screen adaptation of a beloved existing property could feel this funny and fresh, there’d be less to fear about an industry besieged by recycled material that never takes a risk.

Gottsagen is sympathetic without being pitiable, sweet without being saintly, and funny without making himself the butt of every joke. While the writing is often perfunctory, Gottsagen has a way of making every story beat feel sincere.

A movie that’s scary enough to get under your skin, but not scary enough to stay there.

Despite some major narrative missteps, the film’s bold twist on the mob drama still has a refreshing quality. Maybe The Kitchen would have fared better as a series, with more time for its potential material to simmer.

Consequences thrums with a vibrant current — propelled by a dizzying churn of cigarettes, cocaine, fistfights, and shirtless young men — until arriving at its predictably explosive conclusion. The film’s perspective may be austere, but its heart is defiantly exuberant.

Hodge sells it, just as he sells the rest of an otherwise chintzy film, a Lifetime movie-like drama that falls short of engaging with the many thorny issues it dramatizes.

After a slow-burn first hour, Poulton and Savage unfurl a climax that unexpectedly brings together all of the pieces fighting for Mara. It’s nerve-jangling and raw, and the filmmakers earn their tension and the gruesome harm that comes with it. (There are plenty of snakes.) All that goodwill comes close to collapse, however, as Poulton and Savage charge toward the finale.

A winsome and delicate farce about a (fictional) Palestinian soap opera that people are able to enjoy on both sides of the West Bank, Sameh Zoabi’s Tel Aviv on Fire might be the film we need right now if it didn’t have so much fun taking the piss out of the notion that there could ever be a “film that we need right now.”

It’s certainly proof that even dumb movies can endeavor to enlighten the masses, and gels nicely with the broader message: If Hobbs and Shaw can learn to get along, there may be hope for all of us.

The Red Sea Diving Resort is a dull and derivative film that’s too in love with its heroes to bother with its victims.

For Sama isn’t a nightmare with pockets of joy so much as it’s a collective dream that’s playing out under a cloud of impenetrable darkness.

Longley’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated “Iraq in Fragments” finds a way to negotiate between empathy and condescension.

As much as the suspense remains in play, its main threat has a certain robotic quality, and the humorless tone doesn’t help.

The film, like Billingham’s photography, is all the more powerful for its refusal to tidy up, explain itself, or try to glom some kind of retroactive grace onto an impoverished existence that was defined by boredom and neglect.

It’s the work of a studio that’s gobbled up the rest of the film industry and is still hungry for more. The Lion King feels less like a remake than a snuff film, and a boring one at that.

No matter what form it takes, The Great Hack exists as a giant contradiction sure to evoke strong responses from anyone impacted by its drama, which is basically everyone.

This silly trifle might not stand the test of time, or even be remembered by the time you get home, but it gets you where you’re going with a smile on your face.

As a feat of masochism, Phil is an impressive trick. As a movie, it’s a ghastly mess.

“Words of Love” struggles to thread the needle between a conventional bio doc and a more specific portrait of two souls who found some kind of refuge in each other.

Fans might be appeased by a successful bunt in a long summer of disgraceful strike-outs, but this is still a maddening failure when compared to the remarkable artistry of “Into the Spider-Verse” or the raw pathos of Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man 2.”

The new movie basically jams the archetypes of a John Hughes teen comedy into a minimalist haunted scenario. While that’s not enough to suppress the underlying gimmickry of the storytelling, Annabelle Comes Home at least manages to charm and frighten its way through the purest distillation of the “Conjuring” formula to date.

While Maiden is satisfying on its own, it’s tailor-made for a remake that can dive deeper into a story that has so much life left in it.

By the time it’s finally over, the only person more exposed than its star is her director.

No matter how contrived or hackneyed things get, Buckley’s voice always breaks through the clouds like some kind of divine revelation. And that voice only gets more powerful when Wild Rose finally gives it something to say.

Child’s Play at once repudiates Mancini’s franchise by attempting to make it bigger and bolder while falling back on ingredients we’ve seen before, and seen better. While it sets out to skewer the algorithms that could destroy the world, the remake hews to a mechanical formula — and winds up a product of the same tendencies it’s trying to indict.